Book Review - The Product Marketing Handbook for Software

Thought I would change up the entry today and provide a review of a book I just finished reading, Entitled "The Product Marketing Handbook for Software (4th Edition)", it is an indispensable book if you are building or are part of an ISV and want to maximize your sales and marketing efforts.

I quite enjoyed the book. It was a relatively easy read and reinforced a lot of experiences I have learned "the hard way" over the years. I only wish I would have bought this book sooner, as my ROI would have been met many times over in the prevention of stupid mistakes I allowed us to make in the last company I built. More importantly, I now know the "right" questions to ask when wanting to measure results of programs we will execute through our marketing plan at the new company I am building, allowing me to better invest my monies in building both the top and bottom line revenues of the business.

The only complaints I have about the book are on the editing and actual physical delivery of product. I’m not sure a lot of effort was placed in actually editing this book. In NO WAY should I even criticize anyone else's writing since mine can be so poor, but it's my blog so I will :)

I consistently would find incorrect wording throughout the document. The thing was definitely put through a spell checker, but actual grammatical syntax errors kept popping up. I found that this provided for a disjointed read as I would have to reread some sections from time to time to grasp what it was that was being said. For a book in its forth edition, I am only hoping that this was in areas of new content, and not in stuff that has been published for a while.

The second complaint is on the actual delivery and the physical product. I convinced Muckhead to also buy the book and we both got the books in somewhat poor condition. Muckhead's copy was so badly damaged the CD was cracked; the book was torn and quite frankly looked like it was used. Mine was in a little better shape, but not by much. We contacted Rick (the author) and he basically deflected it as an issue with Canada Post. I’m sorry, but I order at least 1 book a month, and this is the first time EVER that I got a book in this condition. The reality is the book should be sent in a protected box, not in an envelope.

All and all, those are pretty petty complaints in comparison to the actual content. I can overlook the condition of the book and even the grammar as I still learned so much from the content. If you are even considering building an ISV that will be selling software, you should buy this book.

So whats next to read? I ordered Coder to Developer: Tools and Strategies for Delivering Your Software last week and hope to start reading it this weekend (assuming it arrived today). Don't worry... I'll post a review :)